Efficient authentication and key management scheme for wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh network (WMN) is considered as one of most emerging field for the research work in today's networking area due to its various approaches available to handle the network resources. Various architectures have been proposed so far and main key challenge for the design of this network is their vulnerability to security attacks. Therefore an efficient key management is required to overcome from such security exploitation such as unauthorised access to the network. WMNs need to be clustered into multiple groups to achieve fast and efficient security mechanism to overcome from security attacks. Therefore, we have proposed a group key agreement protocol based on Diffie-Hellman protocol and digital signature to authenticate the mesh entities within the group. The authentication took place between trusted authority (TA) and mesh clients with efficient communication and computational cost and results in reduction of packet loss by an attacker in wireless network which improves the overall performance of the WMNs. Our experimental result proves that it achieves better communication and computational cost with non-repudiation attack.

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a scalable, reliable, and agile wireless network that supports many types of innovative technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), and Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Due to the limited number of orthogonal channels, interference between channels adversely affects the fair distribution of bandwidth among mesh clients, causing node starvation in terms of insufficient bandwidth distribution, which impedes the adoption of WMN as an efficient access technology. Therefore, a fair channel assignment is crucial for the mesh clients to utilize the available resources. However, the node starvation problem due to unfair channel distribution has been vastly overlooked during channel assignment by the extant research. Instead, existing channel assignment algorithms equally distribute the interference reduction on the links to achieve fairness which neither guarantees a fair distribution of the network bandwidth nor eliminates node starvation. In addition, the metaheuristic-based solutions such as genetic algorithm, which is commonly used for WMN, use randomness in creating initial population and selecting the new generation usually leading the search to local minima. To this end, this study proposes a Fairness-Oriented Semichaotic Genetic Algorithm-Based Channel Assignment Technique (FA-SCGA-CAA) to solve node starvation problem in wireless mesh networks. FA-SCGA-CAA maximizes link fairness while minimizing link interference using a genetic algorithm (GA) with a novel nonlinear fairness-oriented fitness function. The primary chromosome with powerful genes is created based on multicriterion links ranking channel assignment algorithm. Such a chromosome was used with a proposed semichaotic technique to create a strong population that directs the search towards the global minima effectively and efficiently. The proposed semichaotic technique was also used during the mutation and parent selection of the new genes. Extensive experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithm. A comparison with related work shows that the proposed FA-SCGA-CAA reduced the potential node starvation by 22% and improved network capacity utilization by 23%. It can be concluded that the proposed FA-SCGA-CAA is reliable to maintain high node-level fairness while maximizing the utilization of the network resources, which is the ultimate goal of many wireless networks.

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is recently emerged network having robustness. It supports clients to communicate with different types of networks, Internet etc which provides a better service to next generation. It consists of mesh routers and mesh clients. These mesh routers are minimal mobile and mesh clients are totally mobile. The protocols of Ad hoc network are used in WMN. These protocols assume that every node is mobile. But as the mesh routers are minimal mobile or not mobile, the protocols brings overhead for the mesh routers. Our task is to relieve mesh routers using ad hoc network protocol from the overhead and define a better protocol which will fit in WMN efficiently. To do so, we've found that the existing architecture of WMN is needed to be changed slightly. We have proposed a new architecture for Wireless Mesh Network. In our proposal WMN is relieved from overhead being caused by using ad hoc network protocol. Our architecture use unicasting technique in lieu of broadcasting technique for route discovery as well as route maintenance. We will first describe the overview of WMN, its existing architecture. Later we will go to our proposed architecture.

Resource allocation and admission control algorithm based on non-cooperation game in wireless mesh networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of lightweight devices to measure sensitive data that are highly vulnerable to security attacks due to their constrained resources. In a similar manner, the internet-based lightweight devices used in the Internet of Things (IoT) are facing severe security and privacy issues because of the direct accessibility of devices due to their connection to the internet. Complex and resource-intensive security schemes are infeasible and reduce the network lifetime. In this regard, we have explored the polynomial distribution-based key establishment schemes and identified an issue that the resultant polynomial value is either storage intensive or infeasible when large values are multiplied. It becomes more costly when these polynomials are regenerated dynamically after each node join or leave operation and whenever key is refreshed. To reduce the computation, we have proposed an Efficient Key Management (EKM) scheme for multiparty communication-based scenarios. The proposed session key management protocol is established by applying a symmetric polynomial for group members, and the group head acts as a responsible node. The polynomial generation method uses security credentials and secure hash function. Symmetric cryptographic parameters are efficient in computation, communication, and the storage required. The security justification of the proposed scheme has been completed by using Rubin logic, which guarantees that the protocol attains mutual validation and session key agreement property strongly among the participating entities. Simulation scenarios are performed using NS 2.35 to validate the results for storage, communication, latency, energy, and polynomial calculation costs during authentication, session key generation, node migration, secure joining, and leaving phases. EKM is efficient regarding storage, computation, and communication overhead and can protect WSN-based IoT infrastructure.

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) integrate the advantages of WLANs and mobile Ad Hoc networks, which have become the key techniques of next-generation wireless networks in the context of emergency recovery. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are multi-hop wireless networks with instant deployment, self-healing, self-organization and self-configuration features. These capabilities make WMNs a promising technology for incident and emergency communication. An incident area network (IAN) needs a reliable and lively routing path during disaster recovery and emergency response operations when infrastructure-based communications and power resources have been destroyed and no routes are available. Power aware routing plays a significant role in WMNs, in order to provide continuous efficient emergency services. The existing power aware routing algorithms used in wireless networks cannot fully fit the characteristics of WMNs, to be used for emergency recovery. This paper proposes a power aware routing algorithm (PARA) for WMNs, which selects optimal paths to send packets, mainly based on the power level of next node along the path. This algorithm was implemented and tested in a proven simulator. The analytic results show that the proposed power node-type aware routing algorithm metric can clearly improve the network performance by reducing the network overheads and maintaining a high delivery ratio with low latency.

The nature of wireless transmission leads to vulnerabilities to many malicious activities, and communication in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) must be protected by proper security measures. This paper focuses on symmetric pair wise key establishment and presents a new matrix-based pair wise key establishment scheme for mesh clients. In WMNs, mesh routers are much more powerful than mesh clients, both in communication and computation. By taking advantage of this heterogeneity, our new scheme delegates energy-consuming operations to mesh routers when establishing pair wise keys for mesh clients. Additionally, neighbor mesh clients in our scheme can directly establish pair wise keys with significantly reduced communication and storage costs, due to the use of both pre and post deployment knowledge.

Mesh Client (MC) may be frequently move from the current SMAP to another SMAP in the Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN). The most of the present research papers on WMN assume that the MC is static or quasi static. However, MC may constantly move actually, which connection interruption and packet loss may occur. To solve these problems this paper presents a mobility support strategy for WMN, which consists of two parts: address assignment and mobility management.

Security of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is critical for their deployment and management. To provide the fundamental user authentication, access control and transmission confidentiality services, authentication and key agreement (AKA) is the crucial issue. In this paper, ECC- based self-certified public key cryptosystem (ECCSCPKC) is introduced for constructing WMNs security infrastructure; and its related security schemes, with a few modifications, are used for designing the AKA protocol. The proposed scheme supports an efficient authentication and key agreement between a mesh client and a mesh router, with less cost of communication and computation resources as well as system maintenance.

Intrusion Detection Systems(IDSs) are widely used to detect both known attacks and unknown attacks performed by internal and external attackers in wireless networks. However, challenging issues for developing IDSs in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are 1) supporting interoperability and 2) handling volatile parameters. In addition, security standards for WMN are still in draft stage, and to protect the WMN, IDSs of similar wireless networks such as wireless sensor, Ad-Hoc, MANET can be adopted, but the best performance is not guaranteed. In this paper, we have classified the existing IDSs for wireless networks into four categories namely single layer IDS, cross-layer IDS, reputation-based IDS, reputation based cross-layer IDS, and analyzed the performance of these IDSs with core-layer attacks and detection methodology. Based on our analysis, we address the loopholes in existing IDSs and specify research directions for strengthening the existing IDSs and for developing new efficient IDSs with respect to backbone mesh and client mesh networks.

Nowadays there are inexpensive WiFi devices that have fostered the deployment of wireless communities. Well known routing protocols used in the Internet do not fit well to time varying characteristic of wireless networks. This has motivated an intensive research on routing protocols for wireless mesh networks. At this time there are a number of mature and stable implementations that are being deployed in production networks. In this paper we focus on the experimental evaluation of a production Wireless Mesh network being deployed in a testbed at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) and a quarter of the city of Barcelona, Spain. To our best knowledge, this is the first paper where a production community wireless network using 802.11an is analyzed.

There is a growing interest in ad hoc wireless networking internationally, due to the great cost in infrastructure and the time delay for deployment for new traditional wireless networks for a specific purpose (i.e. cellular systems). The interest arises from the possibility of delivering telecommunication services rapidly and with the reduced needs for costly generic infrastructure. Examples of such services include, among others, a convention where a large number of people are concentrated in a limited geographical area, a university campus with a great density of telecommunication users, or even a disaster area where the fixed infrastructure have been damaged. In most examples, ad hoc wireless networks may complement or replace the existing wireless telecommunications infrastructure. One flavor of ad hoc wireless networks that is of interest in this context, and is well adapted to the Lebanese market, are wireless mesh networks (WMN). We propose that the proliferation of WiFi hotspots in high-density areas of population in Lebanon forms the basis of deployment of mesh routers for a WMN. Of specific interest is to be able to use the dense infrastructure of GSM-EDGE (and in the future HSUPA) cellular networks in Lebanon to interconnect those routers in specific locations where it will be hard to deploy additional fixed and cumbersome cellular infrastructure. Locations where hotspots are already deployed (commercial centers, university campuses, business areas, etc.) or could be deployed for special events (conventions, concerts, etc.) could thus be interconnected in a hybrid wireless network, resulting in significantly increased capacity of the network for local voice and data traffic at little additional infrastructure cost. Furthermore, this could a preliminary step for direct connection between the mesh routers and not via the cellular network, into what will become a full- fledged WMN. The structure of the paper is as follows: section the author gives an introduction on ad hoc wireless networks; section II describes WMN and define the design issues of WMN; in section III, we look at a proposed scenario for deployment of WMNs in the Lebanese market and the issues of interconnection with the GSM networks. We will conclude in section IV.

The wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have become one of the popular technologies of the wireless network utilization. WMN provides reliable and scalable wireless network because of its features such as dynamic self-organizing, self-configuring, Self-managing and self-healing. Routing protocols play an essential role in finding and establishing an active route from a source to a destination in WMNs. This article focuses on the performance evaluation and comparison of some routing protocols commonly used in WMNs for VoIP application: AODV, DSR, OLSR and TORA has been investigated over client Wireless Mesh Networks based on OPNET simulation in a different network sizes and mobility. This article presents a background of some designs and solutions based on an elaborated simulation investigation. The performance comparisons are carried out with regard to the node variation in network sizing and mobility. Based on the empirical outputs, the authors suggested that to utilize a specific routing protocol in certain situations.

The popularity and the constant improvement of wireless technologies, such as WiFi and WiMAX, have been increasing the usage and applicability of new networking schemes, including Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). WMNs are multi-hop wireless networks made by a collection of two types of nodes, mesh routers and mesh clients. Their self-organizing, self-configuring and self-healing proprieties, in conjunction with their low maintenance and implementation costs, make them especially appealing as a solution for Internet access and social networking. The characteristics of WMNs make them more susceptible to malicious attacks than traditional wired networks, namely the scarce bandwidth, the high level of interference, the shared transmission media and the limited physical security. Secure routing and forwarding schemes are a key component to guarantee secure communications in hostile environments. There are however issues that must be considered when developing secure routing and forwarding solutions, namely the overhead introduced by such approaches and the effectiveness of the prediction schemes used. This paper discusses the main solutions for routing security in WMNs and presents a thorough evaluation, comprising a novel way to characterize the effectiveness of such approaches. The evaluation is based on CONFIDANT, a secure routing protocol based on the DSR protocol. The study performed addresses both the issues aforementioned and provides insight on the trade-offs associated with the deployment of secure routing and forwarding mechanisms.

In a mobile wireless ad hoc network, mobile nodes cooperate to form a network without using any infrastructure such as access points or base stations. Instead, the mobile nodes forward packets for each other, allowing communication among nodes outside wireless transmission range. As the use of wireless networks increases, security in this domain becomes a very real concern. One fundamental aspect of providing confidentiality and authentication is key distribution. While public-key encryption has provided these properties historically, ad hoc networks are resource constrained and benefit from symmetric key encryption. In this paper, we propose a new key management mechanism to support secure group multicast communications in ad hoc networks. The scheme proposes a dynamic construction of hierarchical clusters based on a novel density function adapted to frequent topology changes. The presented mechanism ensures a fast and efficient key management with respect to the sequential 1 to n multicast service.